Karen McDougal confirmed to CNN in an interview on Thursday that she had a 10-month sexual relationship with Donald Trump before he was president, saying they were together "many dozens of times."

"I can tell you we saw each other a minimum five times a month, up to bigger numbers per month," the former Playboy model told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Advertisement

She said they were together "many dozens of times," and when asked by Cooper if they were intimate, she responded in the affirmative.

McDougal's comments came just days after she filed a lawsuit against American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, to seek an end to a contract with the company that she said had sold away her rights to tell her story under false circumstances.

The agreement signed in 2016 and the alleged affair more than a decade prior came to light in a Wall Street Journal report shortly before the election. Representatives for Trump have denied an affair occurred.

McDougal said that, when she would travel to meet Trump, he would reimburse her for the flights. She said she presumed this was a precaution to eliminate a paper trail.

McDougal described the alleged affair from 2006 to 2007 as a consensual, loving relationship, and said she did not know Trump might have been seeing other women at the time besides his wife. She also said, that throughout their relationship, he did not use protection.

"I didn't know he was intimate with other ladies," she said on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." "I thought I was the only one."

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who legal name is Stephanie Clifford, has also gone to court to break her silence about an alleged affair with Trump around the same time.